Barefoot and shirtless, Karim Sawadogo, 9, works with his uncle in a gold mine at Kowekowera mining village, Burkina Faso. He has been to school, but only for a while. "My dream," he says, "is to make enough money so I don't have to do this anymore."

Hermann Waldenburg (Hermann Vogt), German designer, artist and photographer born in 1940 in Waldenburg.

He studied art in Berlin and traveled with a scholarship to Mexico and Central America, where he worked as an artist and exhibited his works. In 1968 he started using the name of his hometown as artistic name.

In 1969-70 he moved to Madrid with a scholarship, entering the Printmaking Workshop of the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where happen to meet a number of artists of many nationalities and creative styles, and where Hermann stood out for his great technical mastery.

In 1973-74 he trained at Villa Massimo in Rome, obtaining the Award of the Federal Republic of Germany in the III International Biennial of Graphic, Florence 1974.

In addition to his work as an artist, Waldenburg is recognized by the photographs of the Berlin Wall he made for years.

He bought a Minolta camera "just to photograph the wall", and did so until 1994 "when images became less interesting." For him, the wall is a very important part of his life, having lived its construction and subsequent fall. Documentation of graffiti made by anonymous artists of the Berlin Wall have enabled him to gather a unique testimony of this ephemeral street art, which has resulted in the book Mauer Kunst - und Objektkunst Graffiti in Berlin from 1989 to 1994.

Larry C. Price, American photojournalist born in 1954 who has won two Pulitzer Prizes: In 1981 in Spot News Photography, recognizing images from Liberia published by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and in 1985 for Feature Photography for images from war-torn Angola and El Salvador published by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

He received a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977. He was a member of The Daily Texan staff during his senior year in college.

His journalism career has spanned three decades. After college, he joined the El Paso Times staff. He then worked on the news staff at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. During that time [1979-1983], Price also was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1983, he left Fort Worth for The Philadelphia Inquirer to work as a photojournalist and later director of photography. After leaving the Inquirer in 1989, Price worked on contract for National Geographic before returning to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as an assistant managing editor in 1991. In 1996 Price joined The Baltimore Sun photography staff. He was named assistant managing editor for photography for The Denver Post in 2000 where he remained until mid-2006. He is currently an editor for Cox Media Group in Ohio, CMG Ohio operates a converged newsroom that combines the Dayton Daily News, WHIO TV and WHIO Radio.

Richard Harrington, Canadian photographer born in 1911 in Hamburg, Germany.

He is best known for his photographs taken in the Canadian Arctic between 1948 and 1953.

He immigrated to Canada in the mid-1920s. During his career he traveled to more than 100 countries and his photographs have appeared in more than 24 books. His work has been shown at the National Archives of Canada, the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Modern Art.

He studied painting and sculpture in Cuba and filmed his first short "Sarna" before leaving for Paris at the age of 20 where he studied Audio Visual Techniques. In 1950 he worked for Henri Langlois director and co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française. This association lead to the foundation of the original Cinemateca de Cuba, officialised as an institution in 1948, and founded by Herman Puig and Ricardo Vigón, which would later be reborn in 1961 with the initiative of Alfredo Guevara and the then newly formed ICAIC as today's Cuba Cinemateca.

From the 60s to the 70s Puig worked in advertising as a photographer and publicity filmmaker in Spain. It was in Madrid that he first started experimenting with male nudes but was arrested in an alleged drugs affair and charged as a pornographer under the climate of the socialist government. It was at this point that he moved to Paris in an attempt to prove to Spain and the world that he was not a pornographer but an artist and was accepted with almost universal acclaim. A little later he moved to Barcelona where he remains to this day.

Herman Puig continues photographing male and female nudes past the age of 80 and was made the subject of a film by David Boisseaux-Chical about his cultural exile from Cuba. In the film he continues to affirm his dislike at being associated with the worlds of pornography and homosexuality, simply for wanting to photograph male bodies as art instead of that of women.

William M. Gallagher, American photographer born in 1923 who won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his photograph of presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson II. Gallagher was a photographer for 27 years with the Flint Journal in Flint, Michigan.

In 1936 he moved to Flint and graduated from St. Matthew's High School in 1943. During World War II he served in the United States Army in the signal corps, medical corps, and air corps.

Gallagher earned his first camera while in high school by selling magazines. He began his professional photography career with the Sporting Digest in Flint in 1946. The following year he moved to the Flint Journal and within a few months became a staff photographer, a position he would hold until his death. Gallagher's colleagues described him as "a boisterous, flamboyant character" who had good relationships with local police and government officials.

Gallagher snapped his Pulitzer-winning photo at a Labor Day rally in Flint Park. Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was seated on a platform with Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams. Gallagher, kneeling at the base of the platform, took a photo of Stevenson seated with his legs crossed, which revealed a hole in the bottom of his right shoe.

Alexeï Vassiliev, Russian photographer born in 1959. He lives in France since 1993.

Studied at the Lycée Romain Rolland and the University of the Humanities in Moscow.

Not a very orthodox young Communist – thus not to be trusted – Vassiliev could not become an interpreter, his dream at the time. After two years of military service in the Red Army, including six months with a disciplinary battalion in Siberia, he decided to earn his living working, successively, in television, radio, and then in various factories and on construction sites. In short, the classic trajectory of every Soviet who, without being an outright dissident, refuses to adhere to the official norms.

After the perestroïka, he was finally able to exercise his profession as interpreter; he also translated French mystery novels into Russian.

It was when he arrived in France fourteen years ago that photography entered his life in an altogether fortuitous way. A journalist friend asked him to replace, on the spur of the moment, a photographer who was to accompany her on an assignment. One morning in May 1995 they left for Avignon to interview the Count De Sade and to visit the château where his ancestor, the “divine Marquis,” had lived.

Encouraged to explore, alone and self-taught, almost secretly, the meanders of conceptual photography, this became the experience that changed the course of his life.

John Bulmer, British photographer and filmmaker born in 1938, notable for his early use of colour in photojournalism.

He started photography when young. Although his earliest interest in it was primarily as a technology (he even built his own enlarger), he was a great admirer of Henri Cartier-Bresson as a teenager.

Bulmer studied engineering at Cambridge, where his interest in photography deepened. While still a student he had photographs published in Varsity as well as a magazine he co-founded, Image; and did photostories for the Daily Express, Queen, and Life. He also worked as an assistant to Larry Burrows and Burt Glinn. The Life story led to his expulsion from Cambridge six weeks before his finals.

On his expulsion, Bulmer attempted to get a job with the Daily Express; after three days of repeated attempts, the newspaper gave him one. He stayed for two years. After this he worked on assignments for a number of magazines: first in black and white, for Queen, Town, and Time and Tide.

Thanks in part to a wave of creative people from the north of England, the north was at the time enjoying a vogue in the south. Bulmer's first assignment there was in 1960, for Town, to spend three days photographing the fast-declining Lancashire town of Nelson and compare it with the fast-growing Watford. He found the experience eye-opening and enjoyable.

As we only have one February 29 every four years, we celebrate the anniversaries of three artist and a photograph.

On February 29 is the birthday of

Gilles Francis Charles Bensimon, French fashion photographer born in 1944, and the former International Creative Director of Elle magazine. He has also been the photographer on the reality television series America's Next Top Model.

He had advanced dyslexia so his mother said if he did something in art he could express himself better. Living in Paris, France, he joined French Elle in 1967. Two years later Bensimon helped launch American Elle, for which photographed Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, Rachel Williams, Honor Fraser, Yasmin Le Bon, Elle Macpherson, and Beverly Peele.

During his tenure as International Creative Director and Head Photographer of Elle magazine, Bensimon's vision reached an estimated 20 million readers worldwide. He is well known as a celebrity photographer, with a portfolio consisting of leading models and celebrities, including Schiffer, Campbell, Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Nadège du Bospertus, Gisele Bündchen, Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sharon Stone, Keira Knightley, Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, Reese Witherspoon, Sarah Jessica Parker, Halle Berry and Uma Thurman. His commercial clients range from Kohl's to Saks Fifth Avenue and Maybelline to Clarins.

He grew up on a ranch in New Mexico and left home at the age of 16. After holding a number of different jobs, he entered dentistry school, but was drafted into the army in 1940. Eventually he entered officer school. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he island-hopped with General Douglas MacArthur and remained in Japan during the occupation.

While Gould held many jobs during his life, including railroad-tie repairer, boxer, aviator, and painter, it was his pursuit of photography that would change his life. For nearly a quarter of a century he practised as a portrait photographer, eventually shifting into fine art photography.

Gould repeatedly asked for the Denver Art Museum to display fine art photography, but director Otto Bach refused to consider the medium. To make artistic photography available to the public, Gould and others created a venue for displaying works directly behind the Denver Art Museum—eventually this would become the gallery Camera Obscura. This is now one of the oldest galleries dedicated exclusively to fine art photography. Gould's gallery gave Sebastião Salgado his first show in America, and has been publishing the Photography in the Fine Arts Quarterly since 1983.

Hercules Florence (Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence), French-Brazilian painter and inventor born in 1804, known as the isolate inventor of photography in Brazil, three years before Daguerre (but six years after Nicéphore Niépce), using the matrix negative/positive, still in use. According to Kossoy, who examined Florence's notes, he referred to his process, in French, as photographie in 1834, at least four years before John Herschel coined the English word photography.

In 1832, with the help of a pharmacist friend, Joaquim Correa de Mello, Florence began to study ways of permanently fixing camera obscura images, which he named "photographia". In 1833, they settled on silver nitrate on paper, a combination which had been the subject of experiments by Thomas Wedgwood around the year 1800. Unlike Wedgwood, who was unable to make photographs of real-world scenes with his camera or render the photograms that he did produce light-fast, Florence's notebooks indicate that he eventually succeeded in doing both. Unfortunately, partly because he never published his invention adequately, partly because he was an obscure inventor living in a remote and undeveloped province, Hércules Florence was never recognized internationally as one of the inventors of photography.

Aircraft 6338, a FE2b belonging to 20 Squadron RFC (Royal Flying Corps) is examined by Uhlans (lancers) from one of the Garde Ulanen or Saxon Ulanen regiments (Royal Prusian Army)

The official records indicated the aircraft was on a reconnaissance mission when it was forced down by enemy aircraft near Menin. The aircraft landed intact and both crewmen were taken prisoner. A Vizefeldwebel Wass claimed the victory, however there is little record of him anywhere in any reference.

This particular aircraft was a presentation aircraft dubbed "Ceylon No 3".

This is an open art blog, so you could find images eventually offensive or umconfortable.

If you're an artist and find here images of your art you want to be removed, just tell me and I'll do it immediately. I try to ask for permission always if artist is alive and there's a way to contact, bot not always is possible and there are things I think worth to be known.

In any case, the copyrights of all the images contained in this blog, except where noted, belong to the artists or the legal owners of such rights, and have been published nonprofit and for the only purpose of make the works known to the general public.

Enjoy "El Hurgador", make any comment you like (respecting artists, other visitors and myself), make suggestions, critics, leave your opinions and make your contributions. Always welcome.